Advanced Usage

Automatic Account Creation

django-browserid will automatically create a user account for new users. The user account will be created with the verified email returned from the BrowserID verification service, and a URL safe base64 encoded SHA1 of the email with the padding removed as the username.

To provide a customized username, you can provide a different algorithm via your settings.py:

# settings.py
BROWSERID_CREATE_USER = True
def username(email):
    return email.rsplit('@', 1)[0]
BROWSERID_USERNAME_ALGO = username

You can can provide your own function to create users by setting BROWSERID_CREATE_USER to a string path pointing to a function:

# module/util.py
def create_user(email):
    return User.objects.create_user(email, email)

# settings.py
BROWSERID_CREATE_USER = 'module.util.create_user'

You can disable account creation, but continue to use the browserid_verify view to authenticate existing users with the following:

BROWSERID_CREATE_USER = False

Custom Verification

If you want to customize the verification view, you can do so by subclassing django_browserid.views.Verify and overriding the methods to insert your custom logic.

If you want complete control over account verification, you should create your own view and use django_browserid.verify() to manually verify a BrowserID assertion with something like the following:

from django_browserid import get_audience, verify
from django_browserid.forms import BrowserIDForm


def myview(request):
    # ...
    if request.method == 'POST':
        form = BrowserIDForm(data=request.POST)
        if form.is_valid():
            result = verify(form.cleaned_data['assertion'], get_audience(request))
            if result:
                # check for user account, create account for new users, etc
                user = my_get_or_create_user(result['email'])

See django_browserid.verify() for more info on what verify returns.

Custom User Model

Django 1.5 allows you to specify a custom model to use in place of the built-in User model with the AUTH_USER_MODEL setting. django-browserid supports custom User models, but you will most likely need to add a few extra customizations to make things work properly:

• django_browserid.BrowserIDBackend has three methods that deal with User objects: create_user, get_user, and filter_users_by_email. You may have to subclass BrowserIDBackend and override these methods to work with your custom User class.
• browserid_login assumes that your custom User class has an attribute called email that contains the user’s email address. You can either add an email field to your model, or add a property to the model that returns the user’s email address.

Custom Verify view

You can override which class is the view class for doing the verification. This can be useful in the case where you want to override certain methods that you need to work differently. To do this, set BROWSERID_VERIFY_CLASS to the path of your own preferred class.

Here’s an example:

# settings.py
BROWSERID_VERIFY_CLASS = 'myapp.MyVerifyClass'

# myapp.py
from django_browserid.views import Verify
class MyVerifyClass(Verify):
    @property
    def success_url(self):
        if self.user.username == 'Satan':
            return '/hell'
        # the default behaviour
        return getattr(settings, 'LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL', '/')